Thomas de Waal: Azerbaijan will not leave Nagorno-Karabakh conflict frozen for long

Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that the upcoming OSCE summit in Astana will mark a political breakthrough in Nagorno-Karabakh conflict resolution, British expert on South Caucasus at Carnegie Foundation Thomas de Waal told news.am.

"It will be quite the contrary. Since suspension of normalization of Armenian-Turkish relations this year, negotiations on Karabakh got frozen and the situation at the contact line deteriorated. And public both in Azerbaijan and Armenia is against compromise and peace," the expert said.

The possibility of a war in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict for next 2 or 3 years is low although growth of arms of Azerbaijan increases the danger of such a possibility for long-term, the expert added.

"I'm more worried that the incidents on the contact line may become more frequent and lead to deaths of several dozen soldiers which will spoil the current peace process. As a result, the situation will become tenser, and the line of contact will be more dangerous. Therefore, I believe that priority should be given to consolidate the ceasefire,” de Waal said.

According to the analyst, the current negotiation process is more like a "conflict management” than a peace process.

"Of course, a frozen conflict is better than war. But I do not believe that Azerbaijan will leave conflict frozen for a long time, at least without a return of 5 regions. So I think it would be better to start taking confidence-building measures to reduce the likelihood of conflict," he said.


/Vesti.az/